The Emperor quartet: reflection and fantasia

The Emperor String Quartet applied forceful, bright, even harsh attacks to works by James MacMillan, Harrison Birtwistle, Benjamin Britten and William Walton on Monday in the Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The subtitle of MacMillan’s String Quartet No. 2, “Why Is This Night Different?,” suggests programmatic intentions. The question comes from the Seder service that commemorates the exodus of the Jews from Egypt.

For much of MacMillan’s one-movement work, which lasts about 20 minutes, the instruments take turns carrying the melodic -- almost narrative -- line. The others react, bathe it in response or amplify it in cresting waves. There is conflict, development and resolution as the four sections fall into the standard four-movement quartet and symphony pattern. At the end, the piece lifts off into a higher dimension with lightly stroked glissandi above a sustained note on the cello.

The quartet -- violinists Martin Burgess and Clare Hayes, violist Fiona Bonds and cellist William Schofield -- also played three of Birtwistle’s “Nine Movements for String Quartet,” sandwiching the clock-action “Frieze 2” between the aggressive “Fantasia 1” and paranoid “Fantasia 4.” Indeed, in “Fantasia 4,” the composer set up the poor violist, who got stopped short every time she stepped out of line.

The quartet opened the program with Britten’s youthful, pungent “Three Divertimenti” (written in 1936 but suppressed by the composer and only published seven years after his death in 1976) and closed it with Walton’s faceted, post-World War II Quartet in A minor.